You can send messages to a Tam-Tam pocket receiver for free if you do
it using Internet, at least until the end of '96 (you may wonder how
do the guys make money, but after all, these are not your
business). In order to do this, a message with the right format must
be sent to their Web server.

I wrote a very simple PERL
script to send a message from a Unix workstation. For example, you
type tam-tam john "Hello john", and John's receiver gets
the message. Another possibility:

make -k | tam-tam john

And the result of the compilation is sent to John. Silly isn't it ?
A last one:

What you need

How to get it ?

Just copy the script at your place, perform a
chmod 755 tam-tam (assuming you saved it under the name
tam-tam), et voilà.

Features

You can type either tam-tam target message, or
tam-tam target, and the message is read from the standard
input. If the target is purely numerical, it's taken as the number
itself, else a lookup is performed in the
$HOME/.tamtam-calepin file, which must be a
sequence of lines of the form:

name number

The name and the number must be separated by tabs (\t). Example:

john 12345678
mum 87654321
marlene 00000000

The script tags every message with the login of the sender at the end.

Caveats

The thing is only a first try written in 2 hours (including analyzing
the protocol used by their server), so don't expect much of it:

There is no handling of the errors that may occur

I keep the display of the telnet messages, at least
we get an idea of what's going on.

No check is done to enforce that the message isn't too long.

Repeat and delay aren't implemented (I can't see any usage with a
program at the other end, anyway).

If the guys from Tam-Tam change the protocol of their server,
everything will blow up !

What if I use Windows or a Mac ?

I don't care.

The script is written in PERL.
Since it calls fork many times, I'd be suprised if it runs under anything
except Unix, but I must admit I haven't tried. It'd be much more
portable if I'd used an HTTP communication library, but I'm lazy...